Relationship Marketing and Customer Contacts

These articles discuss how to successfully roll out a proposal process. It's not enough to have a process. You have to get people to follow it. A lot of proposal managers find it harder to gain process acceptance than it is to have a process in the first place. You may be convinced that your process can help you company boost its win rate, but if you can implement it successfully, it won't matter at all.

No matter how comprehensive your methodology for managing customer contacts is, once you get in front of the customer anything can happen. That is why, in addition to the tools and approaches we recommend for guiding customer contacts, we have prepared this list of lessons learned from our own encounters.

Most of the time it can be really hard to tell whether the customer likes you or not. And it's really hard to establish the credibility of biased stakeholders in your own company. Luckily, we've found an objective way to tell whether the customer really likes you in the only way that matters.

You may have heard the phrase "winning the battle and losing the war." It becomes relevant when business developers focus only on winning the next contract — winning the battle — and give little consideration to winning many more contracts with the same customer. Discover the techniques experienced developers use to build lasting customer relationships that provide a solid foundation from which they can win both the battles and the war against the competition.

The number one reason to identify the program staff and build a relationship before the need becomes a procurement is that all your contacts after that point will be with the Contracting Officer or a representative. So how can you gain insight into the opportunity that goes beyond the information provided by the procurement office, and do it in a way that is fair and legal?